How does a Startup Plan to Change the Way We Use Emails Everyday with Mailbird

Mailbird is a creative email platform that brings productivity back into your life on the most widely used operating system today, Windows. Email today has become very insecure, a major stress in the workplace and slow with the innovative process that adjusts to how we work and communicate online today. NextUpAsia.com chats with the CEO and Co-Founder, Andrea Loubier about how she started this revolutionary business online.

Fast Growing Startup Going to Change the Way We Use Emails

(a) Getting to know about The Start-Up

Tell us more about Your Company – What have you built? What is your product or service to your customers? What is your track-record so far?

Mailbird is my company. It is the smartest, fastest and most secure email platform for Windows that brings productivity back into your life. We have roughly 7,000 active users and growing. We are a team of 8 incredibly smart and talented people who believe in this mission to build the greatest email productivity platform ever, with a vision to help people become better at information management. We are excited to report that users are already opting to upgrade their software to the yearly paid subscription because they love it so much already, and we are just getting started.

Why did you decide to go into this business? Is it because it is a lucrative market? Is it a Blue Ocean which your talents and expertise through your business can provide?

The market for a proper and modern-age email solution for the Windows platform is very much under-served. Windows still holds the highest majority of the OS market share, email remains the #1 online activity to date, and between consumer and business email accounts they are growing 6% year over year in terms of billions of email accounts. There just is nothing that has adapted to the highly distracting environment for those who work online. Email has become the number 1 stressor and distraction for many people and businesses, and we are already fixing that problem.

Mailbird to Let Businesses Manage Emails more Effectively

Please share with us, when you established your organization during its early days – How did you fund it? Any tips on raising the funds? Any tips on convincing investors?

The initial capital of $100k usd was injected by our CFO and original Mailbird founders and has given us the ability to bootstrap the business, while keeping operational costs down and focusing on product and business development in Bali. We are just recently actively seeking outside investment to give our resource pool a boost for marketing for growth and strategic partnerships that will scale our business.

I don’t think anyone can say there is any one way or tip to convincing investors, you have to just get out there and start talking to as many of them as possible. Make your business case, be able to sell your vision really really well with a track record that proves a future of success and growth for your business. We’ve got all the right recipe in place for this already: A solid team, a really great story, a lucrative product, awesome business development milestones built around growth, including an exit strategy. The final piece is down to finding the right investor that would fit as a great partner with the mutual benefit of seeing that Mailbird succeeds as a global email solution.

Where do you see your business growing into, for the next 5 to 10 years?

We are first going to build a solid email client, that will in a year serve as a platform allowing 3rd party developers and strategic partners to build productivity focused email apps that integrate with Mailbird. We are focused currently on the consumer market, but by 2015 we are looking to expand to the business market by a really great offering to SME’s, small teams and startups alike. In part of this effort we seek to close a series A investment round to allocate more resource for growth and pursuing high security measures when it comes to email, a big problem we face today. Our current focus is to build a solid desktop email application first, to focus on productivity from the desktop…this is where it happens. However in the future, we seek to expand to the mobile platform given the high demand for Mailbird on iOS, Android and even Windows phones.

Mailbird to Make Managing Emails Simple

Here we seek strategic partnerships with ISP’s, security and email message encryption partners, hardware distribution with Mailbird as a software offering on that hardware with Intel’s latest product line and of course a plan to work more closely with Microsoft in their recent expansion to offering IMAP support for Outlook.com, touch technology with their 2 in 1 machines and of course their Windows phone market expansion efforts.

Our immediate and prolonged goal is to build our user base while gathering data on email usage, to solve the unstable environment with email seen today. Mailbird is a global product, and we hope to see more users from around the world using it especially since our recent move to localize the software.

What is your vision for the industry that you are in? Do you see a trend coming up that your business can capitalize?

Our vision is to bring productivity back to people and businesses on a beautiful, incredibly fast and highly secure email platform for the huge worldwide Windows market. As more and more people are working online, email is an inevitable tool that you will use to communicate with friends, colleagues, potential clients and potential business partners.

A major focus today is on productivity, how to stay productive? As well as what tools will be available to help you grow your business? PC World named Mailbird the best free email client for the productive business person in 2013, in 2014 IT World named Mailbird the best email client for Windows.

Tech Crunch and Lifehacker called us the “Sparrow for Windows”, so we knew we tapped into unchartered waters in pursuit of productivity and online communication for Windows users. We hear that everything is going mobile, but when we look at email these projections can be deceiving. It is true that more people open emails on the mobile devices, however when it comes to getting things done with those emails and replying, the desktop and the native in control feel of a client is the answer.

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About Mailbird:

Mailbird is a creative email platform that brings productivity back into your life on the most widely used operating system today, Windows. Email today has become very insecure, a major stress in the workplace and slow with the innovative process that adjusts to how we work and communicate online today. With key productivity hacks and differentiators like multi-account support for both IMAP and POP3 accounts, multi-language support to make Mailbird more globally available, data driven email management with the Wingman productivity booster and a community driven initiative to solve the many unique problems with email.

About The Entrepreneur:

Andrea is the CEO and co-founder of Mailbird, an email tech startup based in Bali that focuses on email security and productivity hacks on the most creative platform for email innovation ever. She is half American and half Filipino, thrives on diversity as a social connector, particularly for women in Asia that are leading influencers and founders of tech companies. With 7+ years of marketing, project and community management under her belt, she is a firm believer in the strength of women in the world of tech, in the fast-evolving startup ecosystem emerging across Asia